Update Jan 2025: The Mountain Writing Competition is on hold for 2025. Scroll down to read the winning entries from previous years.
Every year Mountaineering Scotland invites people to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – to put into writing their experience of the hills and mountains.
The Mountaineering Scotland Mountain Writing Competition is open to anyone living in the UK, and entries can be fact or fiction, with categories for prose and poetry, just so long as the subject matter has a connection with any aspect of mountaineering, rock climbing, walking or ski mountaineering / ski-touring.
For the 2024 competition, we also introduced a new youth poetry category for young people aged 11-17. Entries were assessed by our panel of judges, made up of past competition winners and well-known authors or journalists, with the winning entries published in Scottish Mountaineer Magazine.
Mountaineering Scotland has encouraged creative mountain writing through the competition since 1987, when the competition was started by the then President, Graham E Little. Past Vice President Ingrid Parker introduced a poetry category in 1997.
The coordinator for the annual writing competition is Tommy McManmon.
Tommy is a former winner of the prose section, with People of These Glens in 2012. He lived and worked on Knoydart for over 12 years, during which time he won the Scotsman/Orange Communicator Award for Scottish journalistic writing. He’s recently completed a Masters degree with the Water, Engineering and Development Centre in Loughborough, and now works for the Pentlands Hills Regional Park.
Tommy McManmon
Find out more about the Mountain Writing Competition 2024 and read the winning entries below:
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Mountaineering Scotland is a registered trademark of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland Limited
